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People who don't work in tech have no idea how hard it is to do certain things at scale. Skilled tech people are severely underappreciated. From a sub-tweet:

People who don't work in tech have no idea how hard it is to do certain things at scale. Skilled tech people are severely underappreciated. From a sub-tweet: >> no LLM should ever output a url that gives a 404 error. How hard can it be? As a developer, I'm just imagining a server having to call up all the URLs to check that they still exist (and the extra costs/latency incurred there)... And if any URLs are missing, getting the AI to re-generate a different variant of the response, until you find one which does not contain the missing links. And no, you can't do it from the client side either... It would just be confusing if you removed invalid URLs from the middle of the AI's sentence without re-generating the sentence. You almost need to get the LLM to engineer/pre-process its own prompts in a way which guesses what the user is thinking in order to produce great responses... Worse than that though... A fundamental problem of 'prompt engineering' is that people (especially non-tech people) often don't actually fully understand what they're asking. Contradictions in requirements are extremely common. When building software especially, people often have a vague idea of what they want... They strongly believe that they have a perfectly clear idea but once you scope out the feature in detail, mapping out complex UX interactions, they start to see all these necessary tradeoffs and limitations rise to the surface and suddenly they realize that they were asking for something they don't want. It's hard to understand your own needs precisely; even harder to communicate them.

readthenotes1 2y ago
"How hard can it be?" If I recall correctly, that is one of Dilbert's management axioms: if I don't understand it it cannot be difficult
- DrScientist 2y ago
  Indeed. And I have used the following response to pointy haired bosses on a couple of occasions ( though I don't recommend it ). 'If it's so easy - feel free to do it yourself'.
asadotzler 2y ago
It's all done quite easily when that's the priority but it's not because the priority is hype to keep the cycle going to mint a few more ultra-wealthy assholes. Nothing about fixing 404s would require resources unavailable to these mega-corporations and your and others carrying their water is part of why they don't.
joegibbs 2y ago
I think it could be possible if you're using thinking tokens or via function calls - decide all URLs that will be mentioned while thinking (don't display this to the user), delay for a few seconds to test they exist, push that into the prompt history and then output what the user sees. But it's a bit of an edge case really and would probably annoy users with the extra latency.
Shorel 2y ago
>> no LLM should ever output a url that gives a 404 error. How hard can it be? Very easy. We can replace the error handler with a bullshit generator, and these people will be satisfied, as the whole idea is bullshit by the way.

readthenotes1 2y ago

"How hard can it be?" If I recall correctly, that is one of Dilbert's management axioms: if I don't understand it it cannot be difficult

DrScientist 2y ago
Indeed. And I have used the following response to pointy haired bosses on a couple of occasions ( though I don't recommend it ). 'If it's so easy - feel free to do it yourself'.

asadotzler 2y ago

It's all done quite easily when that's the priority but it's not because the priority is hype to keep the cycle going to mint a few more ultra-wealthy assholes. Nothing about fixing 404s would require resources unavailable to these mega-corporations and your and others carrying their water is part of why they don't.

joegibbs 2y ago

I think it could be possible if you're using thinking tokens or via function calls - decide all URLs that will be mentioned while thinking (don't display this to the user), delay for a few seconds to test they exist, push that into the prompt history and then output what the user sees. But it's a bit of an edge case really and would probably annoy users with the extra latency.

Shorel 2y ago

>> no LLM should ever output a url that gives a 404 error. How hard can it be? Very easy. We can replace the error handler with a bullshit generator, and these people will be satisfied, as the whole idea is bullshit by the way.